Mobile phones offer significant capabilities of interest to users, but a user must physically interact with the mobile phone to navigate menus, make calls, or listen to messages. This physical interaction may be distracting, cumbersome, and intrusive. To reduce the need for physical interaction, an additional wireless device, such as an ear piece or other peripheral device (e.g., a personal hub), may be linked with the mobile phone, such as via a Bluetooth® link. The ear piece or other peripheral device may be configured to exchange audio data and call control information (e.g., attention (“AT”) commands) with the mobile phone. In this manner, the ability of a user to control the operation of the mobile phone via the ear piece or other peripheral device may reduce the distraction, intrusiveness, and burden associated with physical interaction with the mobile phone.
However, mobile phones using the standard Bluetooth® Hands-Free Profile (i.e., Hands-Free Profile 1.6 specification published by the Bluetooth® Special Interest Group, May 10, 2011, available at www.bluetooth.org/Technical/Specifications/adopted.htm, herein incorporated by reference in its entirety) can only support a single subscriber device using the Hands-Free Profile at one time. The standard Bluetooth® Hands-Free Profile will not allow a mobile phone to exchange audio data with a first communication device and call control commands with a second communication device. Only one Hands-Free Profile device may be connected to the mobile phone at a time to exchange call control commands and/or audio data. Therefore, without additional modifications (e.g., additional software on the mobile phone), mobile phones using the standard Bluetooth® Hands-Free Profile cannot support multiple subscriber device systems (i.e., personal hub systems including a personal hub and at least one ear piece).
Previous multiple subscriber device systems have required additional software resident on the mobile phone to convey information to the second communication device using out of band signaling (i.e., non-Bluetooth® Hands-Free Profile established links). While potentially a solution to the limitations of the Bluetooth® Hands-Free Profile, the software based out of band signaling approach requires software to be developed for each phone platform (e.g., Android®, iOS®, RIM®, etc) at significant cost. Additionally, changes, such as updates, to the operating system of a platform may alter the call handling on the platform and require additional modifications to the out of band signaling software. To ensure functionality, multiple versions of the out of band signaling software may be needed for each platform.